Redeeming Our Thinking about History
Redeeming Our Thinking about History: A God-Centered Approach
By: Vern S. Poythress
“Above all, a Christian view takes into account who God is… God rules history. Moreover, he has a plan for history, a plan that encompasses its overall shape and all the details.”
So. I think I came to this book with wrong expectations and so I had to try harder to find my takeaways.
I enjoy history and was interested in how this book talked about history.
There are many voices today that are ‘re-writing’ history, so-to-speak, to fit a particular cultural narrative.
I thought this book would maybe address that. Or would speak about specific eras or historical events and how Christians should look at them. (I mean… look at the cover…)
Instead, Redeeming Our Thinking about History mostly just discussed how Christians, and more narrowly, Christian historians, ought to look at and write about history. In a very general sense.
To be honest, I’m not sure if I really gained any new knowledge. Since I’m not a historian and I don’t plan to analyze history academically, this book probably gave me more information than I felt like I needed. My perception of history is already to view it in terms of God’s sovereignty and his purposes, without making assumptions.
The general principles of the book seemed familiar to me and the nitty gritty details seemed superfluous.
I read some other reviews about this book and I had to chuckle a bit because I don’t think I’m the target audience for this book. I had no idea how to evaluate their critiques. So take my opinion with a grain of salt. I maybe shouldn’t be here…
I think for people who spend more of their time in history, this would be a valuable read.
Maybe my opinion would be different if I knew better what I was getting into.
I think it would have strengthened his book if he had done some sort case studies using particular historical events and shown us in practice what the various perspectives would say about them. Or shown us a comparison between a flawed analysis and a ‘redeemed’ analysis.
Some of the principles just felt too abstract or general.
The book flows through his three aspects of history: events, people, and meanings.
The chapters are divided into five parts:
What we need in order to analyze history
History in the Bible
Understanding God’s purposes in history
What does history writing look like?
Alternative versions of how to think about history
He advocates for a providentialist interpretation— which is studying God’s purposes in history. He discusses the arguments for and against this stance ultimately landing on this: The Bible’s revelations give us guidance to help us make judgements about God’s purposes even though our interpretations are subject to abuse or corruption of overconfidence, bias, etc. God gave us the Bible for many reasons, but one of them is to apply it to our lives. We just do our best with what we have and write/speak with humility.
I guess I found his arguments convincing. I didn’t have a stance on this before reading it so maybe it wasn’t too hard to persuade me.
There is some jargon in this book that I had to look up. I would say it’s a fairly academic book.
I mean, c’mon, he casually uses the words ‘supralaparianism’ and ‘infralapsarianism’ without any definitions or context clues! (If you’re curious now… here’s an explanation of these terms.)
He also kept referring to his analogy of a prayer chain and I think I missed the relevance when he first introduced it in the book so every time he brought it back up I was confused.
Oh, and I got a kick out of so many of his footnotes being references from his other books! Gotta love the confidence!
All of that to say, I will provide some things that I liked or took away from this book:
I liked how he emphasized the importance of history and how God commands us many times to remember and think back on where we’ve been, where we’ve come from. Seeing God’s hand at work in the past, praising him for his works, past, present, and future, is a way to worship God. Keeping history fresh in our minds also reminds us of humanity’s capacity for evil and helps us to resist the arrogant thought that we are any better than humans past. Reading and remembering history increases our wisdom and enhances our view of God.
I appreciated how he cautions us not to assume too much of God’s purposes. Even we’re seeking to view history through a biblical worldview in light of God’s redemption of humanity and with biblical foundations for morality, we still have fallible minds and biases that can affect our views and perceptions. God’s ways are higher than ours and we cannot know all of his ways. Especially about historical events outside of the Bible in which God has not explicitly revealed his purposes.
It’s interesting to think about how, truly, no person interpreting history is doing so neutrally. A lot of history deals with human motivations and what you believe about morality and humanity influence how you think about motivations. It would be hard to defend the idea that any analysis of history is actually neutral. Everyone worships. If it’s not God, it’s a substitute for him.
He talks about how events, people, and meanings are all in harmony when we believe in a personal God who controls everything. But for non-Christian historians, that harmony dissipates if they remove God from the equation.
Conclusion
If you are studying to be a historian or plan to write about history, definitely read this book.
If you enjoy thinking about history, you will probably enjoy most of this book.
If you want an in-depth look at specific historical periods, events, and people viewed through a Christian worldview, you will not find that here.
It was not a bad book, but I feel like it’s a niche book. I’m not saying ‘don’t read this,’ but I will say, that you may find it hard to get through if you’re not really interested in the subject matter.
He teaches this material in his college course, so I wouldn’t say it’s a super accessible, everyone-should-read-this kind of book.
This was my first Poythress book, and I would say I would probably try another one of his books, but I’ll do a little more research before I pick the next one.
Some Quotes:
“The Bible does give us a framework for the whole of history. This framework is there even when we do not explicitly acknowledge it… Every event has significance not only because of God’s plan, which lies at the origin, but because of God’s purpose for the end. Every event contributes to a process leading to an end, the consummation in Christ, the new heaven and the new earth. Every historian has a background in a conception of universal history, because without some universal, meanings dissolve into pure subjectivity.”
“Christians must be on guard against merely drifting along with what “everyone else” does in writing history. The fact that omission of God is common, and the fact that this omission is superficially like the book of Esther, does not amount to saying that it is healthy. Surely it is not, because in many cases the underlying motivation is to suppress the presence of God— across the board.”
“Neutralist advocates of Enlightenment history writing oppose Christian history writings because it brings in religious bias. Marxists oppose Christian history writing because it is deemed to be a mistake to think that there is a God…. Social-justice advocates oppose Christian history writing because it does not automatically and unreservedly take the side of the oppressed. Postmodernists oppose Christian history writing because, according to their viewpoint, it dogmatically claims to know things about God that no one can actually know because of the social, epistemically, and linguistic constraints of humanity.”
“We affirm the value of diverse perspectives— though not the value of the claim that truth is merely relative to each observer.”
**Received an ARC via NetGalley**
This book just released March 15, 2022. You can use my affiliate link below to order.
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